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War and Weapons

In chapter 2 of The Best War Ever, it discusses the conflict about the Bush’s State of The Union address where Bush discussed how Saddam Hussein was seeking significant amounts of uranium from Africa. It was then found that the documents that that contained this information were forged. Not only were they forged, but it was pain stakingly obvious how forged they were. On March 8th, CNN interviewed Joseph Wilson who had a role as an envoy in Niger. Wilson claimed that this particular case was ridiculous. He claimed that the United States had to know that these documents were forged. Wilson continued to go to other media forms claiming this same statement. The White House and CIA officials tried to offer a variety of reasons why this forged information wound up in the Presidents State of The Union address. The White House tried to find out any information on Wilson possible. When looking through Wilson’s information, they found a document marked S for secret. Inside the document they found out that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Wilson (Plame) worked for the WINPAC. They used this information and pitted it against Wilson. The use of this information is an ad hominem argument where it attacks the opponent instead of finding answers. Chapter 3 of the book focuses on the weapons of mass destruction that were supposedly over in the Middle East. The Bush administration spoke about how they knew and were convinced that there were in fact weapons of mass destruction. They had everyone in the United States believing this, including the journalists, who are suppose to be seen as skeptics. Newspapers did not check the facts of these claims until later. The chapter also discusses how different news channels took to this information and how they broadcasted this information to the rest of America. They specifically looked at Fox News and CNN. Because facts were not necessarily checked and the topic gained intensive news coverage as well as high levels of public attention, there was a lot of misinformation that was being circulated to the American public. Due to all the commotion that was stirred up by these accusations of weapons of mass destruction the Pentagon adopted a strategy. This strategy was called the “big impact” plan. This plan called for the gathering and holding on all the information that was being collected about the weapons. I really liked how these chapters included different exerpts from the newspapers and news shows. I do not follow the news very regularly so it was helpful.